Reflections on the First Annual Fintech NerdCon

The week before Thanksgiving, I had the opportunity to gather with ~1,000 of my favorite fintech nerds in Miami at the first Fintech NerdCon. Simon, Colton, Joy and the whole team did a wonderful job curating content and a group of people building the future of how commerce happens. A few take-aways from the trip:

• There is no substitute for in-person collaboration: We are always working on complex money movement problems on behalf of our software partners and their customers. Some problems require partnership between networks, infrastructure providers, issuing, lending, acquiring, and banks. Being able to pull the 3-6 people working on something we won’t announce for 6-9 months together to debate that right path was invaluable.

• Conversations are more productive if you speak the same language: Let’s be honest-fintech/payments/embedded finance, whatever you want to call it, has its own language. There is a subset of people that speak it fluently. During a break in the 3v3 basketball tournament (in which I could barely catch my breath after not playing for 15 years), we had fast-paced, productive conversations covering content that would take non-fluent speakers hours to navigate.

• Speaker content was excellent and authentic: I was honored to speak with Wade Arnold (Moov) and Bo Jiang (Lithic) about B2B money movements. There is so much happening below the water line that will fundamentally change the frequency and speed at which merchants receive their payout/settlement. I also loved listening to other speakers – including scale acquiring executives, agentic commerce identity layer problem solvers, network, banking and lending leaders.

• Visiting with deep, specialized fintech investors: There were an impressive group of heavy hitters that know the industry cold, such as Dan Rosen of Commerce Ventures (Nerdcon podcast episode coming soon). I love being able to test certain product ideas we are refining, learning lessons from their experiences with other portfolio companies, and making the human-to-human connection that often leads to our next partnership.

Net-net, it was a great event that I would highly recommend. I hope this conference remains reasonably sized, easy to navigate and continues to be attended by the real builders of what commerce will look like in 2030 😉